Identity Parade

Life in a police lineup.

Nearly twenty years ago, when I was a student at Oxford, I found part-time work standing in police lineups. I was reading English Language and Literature, and my courses included tutorials on Middle English, Spenser, Shakespeare, the seventeenth century, and the eighteenth century. The most modern author I read was Dickens. I spent a lot of time on Middle English, because we had to learn how to translate Middle English into modern English. We took “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” and the Breton Lays and made them readable. Oxford is divided into colleges, and I was at a small, poor college called Mansfield, which most people have not heard of. Mansfield had only one quad, and the quad had only three sides, so the terminology didn’t seem accurate, but that’s what it was called.

At the start of Michaelmas term, I saw a notice that the St. Aldates Police Station was looking for volunteers to stand in identity parades. They paid ten pounds per parade. Michaelmas was the first term, and the next two were called Hilary and Trinity. As an American at Oxford, I liked all the new words—fresher, mods, subfusc, battels, collections. “Identity parade” sounded formal and impressive, and St. Aldates was right next to Christ Church college. Lewis Carroll had taught maths at Christ Church. Immediately after seeing the notice, I went to the station and signed up.

My first parade was for stealing bikes. The suspect wasn’t much taller than five feet, which immediately became a point of contention for his solicitor. She complained to the police officer in charge that the rest of us were noticeably taller, and we didn’t have long hair, like her client. He was young-looking, possibly in his late teens, and he chose position No. 5, which was dead center. It was the suspect’s right to choose his spot in the parade. I was assigned to No. 2; there were eight volunteers total. Traditionally, the difference between a solicitor and a barrister was that a barrister actually stood in front of the court, to argue his client’s case. Solicitors did a lot of grunt work in their offices: drawing up contracts, giving legal advice. Pretty much everything I learned about the British legal system came from parades at the St. Aldates station.

The station hadn’t finished constructing its viewing room, which would feature a one-way mirror. For the time being, the parades took place in a room where nothing separated the witness from the suspect and the volunteers. The solicitor complained about this, too, and meanwhile the suspect stood there looking self-conscious. He was dressed in faded jeans and he shifted his weight from foot to foot. He wore boots. He ran a finger through his curly brown hair whenever she mentioned it. Apart from being short, he was a good-looking kid—dark eyes, high cheekbones. I didn’t have a problem with him.

The officer had already told us that today’s crime involved stealing bikes. It was standard procedure to reveal the crime beforehand, when each volunteer signed a form, collected ten pounds, and waited for the solicitor. There was a guarantee in the contract that said it didn’t matter if you were picked. But the length of time of any parade was flexible, and it depended partly on the persistence of the solicitor. Today she argued for ten minutes about the difference in height, until the police dragged in a row of school desks so that we could all sit down. After that, the solicitor focussed on the hair problem. A few more minutes passed, and finally the officer in charge called for somebody to bring out nine stocking caps. The caps were navy blue. I pulled mine down to the eyebrows. The solicitor did a walk-through, glaring at the lineup as she went past.

“Sit up straight,” she said sharply to the suspect. He stopped slouching, and she finished the walk-through and stood there, hands on her hips. There was a long pause.

“You can still tell he’s much shorter,” she said at last to the officer. “Look at his legs compared to the others’.”

The argument picked up again, and it didn’t stop until nine blankets appeared. They draped them over our legs so you couldn’t see how high our knees were. The blankets were blue, like the caps, and they were made of heavy wool. I began to sweat. When the witness was finally escorted into the room, he took a quick glance in our direction—nine men sitting at school desks, dressed in blankets and stocking caps—and then he forced himself to look away. He was in his thirties, and he wore a tie. He carried a bike helmet in his hands. He had thin serious lips and wire-rimmed glasses, and he listened intently as the officer outlined the rules of the parade.

I didn’t like the witness. Later, I would learn that the parades almost always provoked this kind of reaction—something made me want to choose sides. Probably it had to do with the passivity, the way that we were treated as props; they often sat us down at desks, or forced us to wear caps, or dressed us in blankets or police coveralls. But it was also uncertain whether we were the audience or the players. We listened to the solicitor argue with the police, and we knew where the suspect was positioned. We saw the witness walk in. We felt the rush of energy that he brought with him—the sense that he had caught a glimpse of some illegal act and now it was hidden in our midst. We could reveal or we could obscure; that was our purpose and perhaps our choice.

On that first parade, I wasn’t prepared for my visceral reaction to the witness. It was irrational: I didn’t like the way he stood there, trying not to look at us. I didn’t like the way he was dressed. I didn’t like the way he clutched his bike helmet. I didn’t like the way he took his role so seriously, nodding at the officer during the introduction. In the grand scheme of things, this seemed to be a small matter, stealing bikes; it wasn’t worth bringing all these people into this place and dressing them in caps and blankets. The witness stared hard at me when he walked past the first time.

I stared back. His gaze was cold and intent—it took me by surprise. He moved on to the next person, continuing to the end of the line before returning. This time I was ready. I looked in his eyes, holding steady for a moment, and then I glanced away. He paused. When he walked past again, I did the same thing, making eye contact and then breaking it. I swallowed hard; I wanted him to see the muscles move in my throat. He kept going, pausing to look at No. 3, then 4, 5, 6. Except for the sound of his footsteps the room was silent. The solicitor and the two officers stood off to the side, watching.

He walked through five times. With every pass, I tried to look as guilty as possible. I could feel sweat running down my back. At last one of the officers broke the silence.

“Can you make an identification?” he asked.

“Yes,” the witness said.

“Are you absolutely certain that you can identify the person that you saw on the evening in question?”

“Yes,” he said, firmly.

“Who was it?”

“No. 2,” the witness said. He pointed straight at me. Again, the reaction was instant: I felt my shoulders droop, and my mouth went dry. The other men in the parade started kicking off the blankets and tugging at their caps; somebody chuckled. An officer led the witness out. The rush of guilt was past, and now I felt like laughing. I looked down the line at the suspect. He grinned and pulled off his cap, shaking out his long hair, and for the first time all evening his solicitor smiled.

I never fit in at Oxford. I was there on a Rhodes Scholarship, and I allowed this identity to become a burden, for reasons that now seem childish. At the time, I knew that I had been a weak candidate for the scholarship, which was probably why I had been placed in such an obscure college. Nobody famous had ever gone to Mansfield. The college was best known for the fact that the opening scene of the 1980 movie “Heaven’s Gate” had been filmed in the quad, although they had handled the cameras in such a way that you couldn’t tell it had only three sides. I rented the movie once, out of curiosity. The opening scene was interminable, and I gave up before figuring out whether there was a connection between Oxford and the American West, but it was enough to understand why the film’s name had become synonymous with high-budget disasters. At a later point in life, I would have taken pleasure in being the worst Rhodes Scholar at a college like Mansfield, where tutors were in fact more likely to spend time with students. But things felt different in my early twenties. Eventually, I drifted away from the others in my scholarship group, and I made few friends during my two years. Much of my time was spent alone.

I liked studying English Language and Literature, especially Spenser and Dickens. I liked “The Faerie Queene” and “Great Expectations,” and I thought the seventeenth century was fine, too, especially “Paradise Lost.” I found that I had a knack for translating Middle English, although I wouldn’t understand the value of that until a couple of years later, when I moved to China and began to learn Mandarin. At Oxford, Middle English seemed enjoyable but pointless, a lot of alliteration and weird words—Wel gay watz Ꝧis gome gered in grene. I liked my tutors. I arrived at Oxford wanting to be a novelist, but after a few months I realized that virtually nothing about my routines felt productive. I wrote very little; practically the only time I sat down and focussed on my journal was after an identity parade. I spent my days reading aimlessly and wandering around town, and it felt wrong to be a drifter in such a strict place.

There were rules everywhere, and that became an obsession, a way to punctuate the boredom. At Mansfield, you weren’t allowed to walk across the grass of the three-sided quad. The only exception was if you were playing croquet on good-weather days during Trinity term. No croquet was allowed during Michaelmas or Hilary. Students called it Trin term for short. There weren’t many good-weather days. I didn’t like croquet. On Wednesday and Friday evenings, my college had formal hall, where you had to wear a gown to dinner. I didn’t like wearing a gown to dinner. They had high table and low table. High table was reserved for faculty members and special guests, who received better food as well as port and sherry. Sherry before the meal, port after. Like the other students, I sat at low table, but I was allowed to wear a longer gown than most, because I already had a bachelor’s degree. Once, I wore shorts under my long gown, to see what would happen, and the head steward told me politely that if I ever did that again I wouldn’t be allowed to attend formal hall. He told me the same thing when I tried wearing a baseball cap. The steward was a friendly man in his forties who seemed willing to give me the benefit of the doubt for making simple American mistakes. I never wore shorts or a baseball cap there again.

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I lived southeast of the university, where rents were cheaper. Cowley Road was the main route through a working-class section of the city, not far from the old auto plants that had been closed down. Unemployment was high in those neighborhoods and the bitterness was tangible; students weren’t supposed to go to certain pubs. The off-limits pub in my neighborhood was called Town and Gown, and I went there only once, to see what it was like. Nothing happened. I drank a pint and used the loo, and then I left. Another student I knew got beaten up late one night on his way home to Cowley Road after a ball. He was wearing a tuxedo, and some townies roughed him up; he spent a day in the hospital. My house got broken into at the end of my first year. The following term, I moved to New Marston, where I could ride my bike across the University Parks on my way to college.

At the start of Hilary term my second year, I was given penal collections for refusing to attend a practice examination at the college. I didn’t have any reason for skipping the exam; I was never busy at Oxford, and I was always looking for something to do. I would have stood in more identity parades if the police had called me. But I decided not to show up at the practice exam just to see what would happen. “Collections” is an Oxford word for college examinations, and “penal” means you could get thrown out if you fail. It’s like academic probation. They had different words for almost everything at Oxford. I passed the penal collections, but that didn’t make me feel any better about the place.

I could have stood in more identity parades if I had been older, bigger, fairer, or darker. The police kept the statistics on file, and an officer named Mitchell telephoned me whenever my profile came up. I had dark hair and dark eyes, and I was of a slim build. I was five feet nine, and I weighed less than ten stone. I never met any other students or Americans at the St. Aldates station, which was one reason I liked going. If the parade took an unusually long time, they gave you fifteen quid. A quid is the same as a pound. There are fourteen pounds in a stone.

My last parade was for arson. They called at half past three, and by the time I arrived at the station a makeup artist had already started painting mustaches on the volunteers. The artist was a woman. I had never grown a mustache, and I was curious to see how it would look.

Officer Mitchell smiled tightly when he told us about the incident. “It’s about that place that was burned down in Cowley,” he said. He was handing out ten-pound notes, and a few of the men nodded when he mentioned the crime. The lineups usually included volunteers from southeast Oxford; most of them seemed to be unemployed, and sometimes I sensed that their contact with the police went beyond parading. Often they finished the lineup and took their tenners across the street to the pub.

I asked the volunteer next to me if he knew anything about the case. He had dark hair and dark eyes, and he was of a slim build. We could have been brothers, although he already had a painted-on mustache while I was still waiting for mine. His mustache didn’t look very convincing. He had heard about the crime.

“It was those Somalians,” he said. “It was a family of Somalians out there in Cowley. First, it was just a guy and his wife. Then more started coming over, their kids and relatives. Pretty soon, they had twelve living there, and two more on the way. Then one night somebody popped open the postbox, poured in some petrol, and dropped a match.”

“Was anybody hurt?” I asked.

“Nah,” he said. “Nothing serious. A kid had to jump out of a window and he broke his legs. I think the father might have been burned up a bit. They had two more on the way.”

He seemed particularly interested in the two more on the way. “Just think about it,” he said. “Two of them rent the place. Fine. Then more keep showing up, and before you know it you got twelve Somalians, with two more on the way. I can understand how the neighbors would get a bit annoyed. I mean, just think about it.”

It was my turn to get a mustache. The artist smiled and held my chin in one hand while she worked on my upper lip. I was thinking about the crime—I wondered how I had missed hearing about it, especially since it had occurred in the neighborhood where I used to live. Later, I would learn that some of the details were wrong—in fact, the Somalis had been living in a hostel rather than a rented house, and they had been on Regent Street, which was very close to my old place. And later I would read in the paper that one of the Somalis had died from his burns.

They were refugees who had been in the United Kingdom for only twenty-eight days before the attack. The authorities suspected that the arson had been racially motivated, and it was the second time this had happened recently in southeast Oxford: a few months earlier somebody had set fire to the home of a Jewish man. It was widely believed that sympathizers with the far-right British National Party were responsible.

I didn’t learn these details until later, but still I felt different from how I normally did at a parade. Never before had I been lined up for something serious, and today there was a nervous energy in the room. The other volunteers were unusually talkative; they cracked jokes about the mustaches. One volunteer told stories about other police lineups he had stood in—he seemed to have a history of this kind of work. He had a strong working-class London accent. I didn’t meet many people in Oxford who talked like that.

“The worst one I ever ’ad wos in London,” he said. “The bloody I.R.A. They ’ad police all round the outside of the building. For protection. It wos a bomb or somefing. I got picked three times. Three times! ’Ell yes, I wos nervous!”

Then he talked about how long his hair used to be. It used to be down to his thighs. I asked him why he had cut it off.

“To get back at me girl,” he said, with a grin. “We wos always like that—always at each other.”

It was hard to imagine how she could have responded to a personal attack of such viciousness. Out of curiosity, I asked what she had done.

“Started going out wiv another bloke,” he said. He had dark hair and dark eyes, and he was of a slim build. His mustache didn’t look very real. I asked him what he had done about the other bloke.

“Straightened ’im out,” he said.

“How?”

“Stuck a knife in ’im,” he said. “Just like this.” He put an imaginary knife in his side and pulled up hard, as if he were yanking on a stubborn zipper.

The room was filled with the uncomfortable silence of people who believe that a liar is in their midst. He didn’t seem to notice.

“The girl wot I got now,” he said to nobody in particular, “she likes to buy me fings.”

Everybody stared at the floor. A few of the volunteers touched their fake mustaches. The man who used to have hair down to his thighs was quiet for half a minute, and then he said, “She wants to buy me a new mountain bike.”

The suspect had dark hair and dark eyes, and he was slightly fat. His mustache looked even less real than ours. His hair was cut short, and I wondered if he was a skinhead who had been advised to let his hair grow. But I also wondered why nobody had told him to get rid of the mustache. He was dressed sloppily, and across his knuckles ran a ghostly string of pale-blue letters—prison tattoos.

The St. Aldates station had finally completed its viewing room, which had a long one-way mirror and video cameras in two corners of the ceiling. Nine chairs were lined up. The officer asked the standard questions: had the suspect agreed to participate, and did he have any complaints about any of the volunteers, and did he realize that he was being videotaped. But the suspect stumbled over his responses, forcing the officer to repeat himself. At first, I thought it was just nerves, but as the questioning continued I sensed that there was a problem with the young man. He looked terrified, and something about his eyes made me think that he might be mentally disabled.

After a while, the solicitor began answering the questions for his client. No, he has no complaints about the volunteers. Yes, he realizes he is being videotaped. A young woman with dyed blond hair stood beside the solicitor, and every time the suspect looked at her she tried to smile back reassuringly. But her eyes were red, as if she had been crying. When she left the room, she mouthed “Good luck” to the suspect.

He chose position No. 5. Usually they went for the edges, but every once in a while somebody took the middle. Today I was No. 6. All of us stood in front of the chairs while the police turned on the video cameras, and then the solicitor asked us to sit. The chairs were lined up close to each other. After we were seated, the suspect held out his hands and pointed at the tattoos—the first indication that he was aware of what was going on. The solicitor turned to the officer.

“His hands shouldn’t be visible,” he said. The volunteer who used to have hair down to his thighs smiled and held out his hands. He also had tattoos across his knuckles.

“Look ’ere, mate,” he said. The suspect turned his head.

“Please keep silent,” the officer said sternly. He told us to keep our hands behind our chairs, out of sight. The solicitor walked down the row and agreed that everything was fine, and then he left the room. The officer called outside, announcing that the parade was ready. He closed the door. The room became very quiet.

I could hear the suspect breathing next to me. He sounded as if he’d just sprinted up a flight of stairs, and I tried to look at his face in the one-way mirror. The reflection was hazy, unclear; I couldn’t tell if his nervousness would be apparent on the other side of the glass. I glanced down the row of faces. The expressions were all the same: lips tight beneath the faint squiggle of a mustache. I looked at myself. My posture was rigid: shoulders drawn back, hands behind my chair. I didn’t look very good in a mustache. For the first time in a lineup, I hadn’t instinctively chosen sides. Staring at my reflection, I suddenly felt as if I were watching myself from a great distance.

And then there was a slight movement on the left edge of the glass. The one-way mirror wasn’t perfect; you couldn’t see clearly through the glass, but it was possible to tell if there was a presence behind it. A dark spot appeared, and then it shifted to the right, crossing the row of reflected faces, as subtle as a shadow in an aquarium. Next to me the suspect breathed harder. A couple of times, his wind caught in his throat, almost like a sob, and now I felt him trembling. My right leg was pressed against his chair, and tiny thrills of vibration ran up through the metal. What did that feel like, to be the suspect in a parade, to be the only one shaking, the only one with a real mustache? I resisted the urge to turn and look; I kept my eyes straight ahead.

The shadow passed five times, each more slowly than the last. The suspect seemed to calm himself; he stopped shaking, and his breathing became shallow, and I wondered if he had resigned himself to his fate. It was the most thoroughly I had ever seen a witness check a lineup at St. Aldates. After the fifth time, the shadow disappeared, and another officer walked into the room.

“The witness did not make an identification,” he announced. Next to me, the suspect exhaled loudly. The solicitor walked back in, along with the blond woman, who was beaming. An officer made a gesture to all the volunteers, and we filed out of the room.

“He’ll go free now,” the man who used to have hair down to his thighs said, and there was joy in his voice. All eight volunteers clattered down two flights of stairs to the side exit. It was dark outside; we had been in the station for an hour and a half. I don’t think any of us remembered that we still had mustaches. The others were talking and laughing and rushing to escape, and the man who used to have hair down to his thighs was the first one out. He leaped down the last three steps, and then, whooping like a child, he ran out into the night. ♦